Gated garages refer to garages where access is controlled by a computer or human operator. Such garages are also referred to in this application as closed garages. Gated garages are commonplace as off-street parking facilities in the central business districts of cities. They are also common in airports, hospitals, universities and in many other parking applications.
Typically, payment is made at the time of exit for the actual time parked although, in some cases, a flat fee may be charged at the time of entry for the entire duration of stay. Unlike on-street parking, there is typically no targeted enforcement by a Checker, or Enforcement Officer (EO), while the vehicle is parked. Enforcement takes the form of denial of access (entrance or exit) if payment is not made. There may be some variations to the above use cases.
In order to charge for parking, it is necessary to know when the customer entered and exited the garage. A variety of means are used to determine when a vehicle entered and exited the lot. These may include the user getting a paper ticket with the entry time numerically stamped or bar-coded on to the ticket. The parking fee may be a flat fee or dependent on the time a vehicle spends in the parking lot. The method of payment may be by cash or credit card and may involve a human operating the exit gate and manually validating the paper ticket. Alternatively, the user may pay by credit card at a payment kiosk, which stamps an “authorization to exit” code on the parking ticket, which is valid for a time period that is sufficient to allow the user to exit. The user may exit by presenting the ticket at a gate operated by an automated ticket reader or a human operator. This method is referred to in this application as “paper ticket based method of payment”.
There are also prior art, gated parking lots where, at the point of entry, the user is required to swipe a credit card or a special identification (ID) Token issued by the garage. The garage is equipped with a computer that identifies the vehicle by the credit card or the identification token and keeps track of elapsed time until the vehicle exits the garage, at which point, the user swipes the credit card or ID Token a second time. The second swiping causes the garage server to calculate the vehicle's stay duration and accordingly charges the credit card or some other pre-arranged payment system. This method is referred to in this application as “ID Token based method of payment”.
The use of payment applications or Apps for gated garages, hosted on wireless communication devices such as Handsets/smartphones or built into vehicles, are rare, although some trials using Near Field Communications (NFC) and optical scanning of codes have been reported.